Lesson 7 - Question & Answer, Summary with Suggestions on Personal Faithfulness to the Lord

© Charles A. Clough 2016

Question & Answer, Summary of Personal Faithfulness to the Lord
Session #07
Keeping Faithful to Our Lord in a Growing Hostile Culture
2016 North Stonington Bible Church Labor Day Conference
Charles Clough
www.bibleframework.org

One of the slides that I didn’t show you at the end of the last session is one I wanted to go back to because there’s a feature in the framework idea that I want to be sure I leave it with you [slide 75].

The framework, like this building, has a structure. You have your beams, the vertical beams in the walls. You have the ceiling. The beams that are holding that roof up are dependent on the structure and the integrity of the beams that are vertical. Throughout the building you have this interconnection.

Engineering and the architect had to design it. They had to have enough structural integrity to hold up against winds, storms, and so on. The framework is much like that. We won’t go into all those details but I just want to give you the idea that the framework has parts to it.

You can say here’s creation, God, man, nature, geology, dating, and archeology. All of that kind of goes together. Then, that in turn, forms a basis of the prophet’s contract follow-up because it provides the means of God revealing Himself. It provides man designed to receive God transmitting revelation into man’s mind.

Here you have the history of the Jews in 2000 BC to 586 BC. Here you have the call of Abraham revealed, the revealed contract at Sinai, the revealed contract of the prophecies of the Messiah, and the birth of the King.

You have the hypostatic union. In order for one half of a hypostatic union, you have to have the creation of man made in God’s image so that God can combine Himself with human beings.

There’s the dependency. If you mess around with this, you automatically mess around with the birth of the King. You have the prophets who look forward to the King so you have a connection there.

This prophetic literature has to be consistent with its fulfillment. Over here you have the call of Abraham and the call of Abraham provides the continuity for the prophets.

The point here is that each part structures the other parts. This is precisely why you can’t play fast and loose with some section of the Bible like Genesis 1 and then hope that you’re not going to mess up the rest of the Scriptures.

That’s why the Bible has this integrity. I don’t know why it is so hard for evangelical scholars to get this. We have evangelical scholars now who worry about reconciling the early chapters of Genesis and so on. They’re making Genesis 1 poetic narrative, whatever that is.

How you can have a narrative and a poet chained together, I don’t know. The point is that they’re trying to grapple with making the Bible fit into the existing cosmologies and it doesn’t work.

Even if you mess with Genesis 1 you have Genesis 2. God made woman out of Adam. How do you do that? Five million years or what? See, there are so many things about the Bible that are supernatural. You have people living 930 years from the Fall until the Noahic Flood.

Then you have the exponential decay period. How do you reconcile that? You can’t. That’s why, thank the Lord for Whitcomb and Morris back in 1960 who decided enough is enough and that we couldn’t make the synthesis. Instead of constantly reinterpreting the Bible every time there’s a new cosmology out there, why don’t we just stop and look at the cosmologies in light of the Bible. There’s some great stuff going on here.

One of the gentlemen asked me about a cosmology and I’ll just briefly mention it. There is a whole community now, three or four trained physicists in cosmology that are Bible-believing Christians. They’re putting the Bible first.

Now [Russell] Humphreys did that book, Starlight and Time a number of years ago. His work has been followed up by Dr. [John] Hartnett, Starlight, Time and the New Physics. He gives you some of the equations so you can work these things out. He teaches what’s going on with relativity.

They’re finding out you don’t need to mess with the text of the Bible because the pictures of cosmology are so fluid out there, so variable by changing a few variables, that there’s not really the problem we think there is. You just have to refine cosmology.

You have to look back. These guys are doing it by looking back at relativity. They’re actually following an Israeli physicist, [Moshe] Carmeli, and they’re looking at Carmeli’s relativity model, CGR. This has great promise. It’s got to be tweaked. We’ve got to think through certain things, but it can certainly explain why light is visible that comes from billions and billions of light years away in distance but time is fluid.

That’s the thing with general relativity. Time is not standard. The Genesis 1 narrative is written from an observer on earth, so it’s an earth clock. The problem is clock and time do not synchronize across the universe. Clocks run faster in an expanding universe.

You can’t take a clock on earth and say light is going at the same speed because speed is relative to time and time is changing. Your equation goes to pieces.

Long story short, there’s a lot of work being done in cosmology and I think that’s one of the last frontiers for us as creationists. The first frontier was dealing with Darwinianism. Thankfully, DNA discoveries of what is going on in the cell, in the structure of DNA, it’s an irreducible complex organ. You can’t create something with incremental changes with something that needs all of its parts to function.

You change one of the parts and you’ve lost the function. Darwin never knew that. His whole theory is even being questioned by evolutionists now. Several prominent evolutionists are saying they have to rethink the whole thing. Neo-Darwinism just doesn’t cut it. Evolution has many problems.

Geology was a problem for a while because of the slow process rates until some of the flood geologists did more field work and they found out that some of the so-called sandstone exhibits show that if you look at the fine scale, they were submarine. It wasn’t air blowing on sand dunes that cause these structures.

It was actually water. There’s a lot of work being done. Again, we don’t get million dollar grants from the National Science Foundation. A lot of these guys are retired people. Keep in mind this. If you’re a creationist and you write your pink slip as far as your job is concerned at the university or anywhere else.

The people who are doing this work are retired physicists that can no longer be threatened because they have their retirement and now they’re free to speak. This is one of the things in science today.

The science that’s being produced is the best that politically allocated money can buy, but there are a lot of frustrated PhDs working in the field just grinding their way through and just hoping they can retire. They need to get out from under the tyranny of laboratories what they’re supposed to be researching.

We have some young men, one person asks about a book on apologetics. One of the nicest books, the easiest to go through and that touches in depth on apologetics is a simple paperback book called The Ultimate Proof of Creation. It’s available, I think, at Answers in Genesis and at ICR.

The book is The Ultimate Proof of Creation by Jason Lisle, who is a PhD in cosmology and astrophysics. What’s good about that book is because he borrows from Greg Bahnsen, who is now dead. Greg and Van Til were the ones who really produced presuppositional apologetics. That means it’s apologetics all the way down to the very depth of presuppositions. It’s very good.

What Jason does, he borrows from that and then he teaches that in that book. Even though it says it’s the ultimate proof of creation, it’s the whole gamut of apologetics. Why I recommend that book to you is because of the appendices in the back. Appendix A and Appendix B are worth the price of the book because for years and years Jason worked out at AIG and he was the one that was wholly instrumental in the way the exhibits were physically built in the creation museum.

How many people here have ever gone to the Creation Museum? Okay, when you went to the Creation Museum at least recently since Jason did his thing, you go to the exhibits and there’s the glass enclosure with all the data. Then on one side of the exhibit is the evolutionary interpretation. On the other side is the creation interpretation.

You can’t go through the museum without saying, “You know, this isn’t about the facts. This is about the interpretation of the facts. Both of us look at dinosaur bones. Both of us look at radioactive dating. Both of us look at say dinosaur bones that have been found with pieces of flesh on them.” It’s a little hard to understand how the flesh stayed there for millions and millions of years without rotting away.

The evolutionists are saying, “Well, that just shows you how long flesh can last.” This is the problem. Once you get in a presuppositional mode, that’s going to control your interpretation of the facts.

Jason was the guy who did a lot of that besides the room where there is the trip through the universe display. He is now head of research of ICR down in Dallas and will probably be instrumental in the museum they’re going to build there. It’s going to be more than a museum. It’s more like a science center.

That book, again, I think is the quickest way of reading these things. Jason Lisle, The Ultimate Proof of Creation.

Norm Geisler has a bunch of books. He’s been around for years. Norman doesn’t work so much with creation. He works with the questions of suffering and reliability of the text and that sort of thing. Norman Geisler is another one.

He has written a book. He’s an older man now and he has a son who is working on the university campuses. They’ve teamed up so it’s Norman and his son, David. They wrote this book called Conversational Evangelism. That’s a nice one because it gives you samples of how to do it and what works and what doesn’t work.

His son has been involved in the post-modern culture on university campuses so you get that in that Conversational Evangelism by Norman and David Geisler. What I wanted to say about Jason Lisle’s book The Ultimate Proof of Creation is that Appendices A and B give you his e-mail exchanges with critics of the museum

He manned that e-mail for years and every conceivable question comes in by e-mail. What’s so nice about these appendices is that he not only gives you the critic, what the critic wrote, but besides that, he tells you how to analyze what that critic wrote. You get the e-mail from the critic, then you get his analysis of what that person is saying and the, third, you get his response. In some cases there are several responses.

You can learn more by watching Dr. Lisle answer those critics than you can in a whole semester of classes. It’s an excellent way of learning because the questions you see are the same questions you’re going to get.

These are the same questions that have been around for years and years. There are only so many limited questions and they come up again and again. It’s very good. I recommend that as a quick book.

I recently gave it to a couple with a girl in middle school. I was surprised that the girl in middle school could pretty well read that and understand the argument. That gave me the encouragement that it’s not just written for adults. Middle school kids can get that book and understand it.

One of the questions we have here is, “Assuming one, the rapture is several years away. Second, the presidential election is normal, there is no hacking or over rigging. Three, there’s a high percentage of voter turnout. If the presidential election results in an obvious social state, can you conceive of any mechanism that might aright this grand ship of state back to capitalism and a more biblical-like government?”

God is capable of doing amazing things. We have seen things happen in the laws of economics. The economy just goes completely to pot and it’s a refutation of the fact that it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s sad because everyone suffers if that happens but sometimes that has to happen to blow away all the garbage. God allows us to suffer the consequences of choices. That may be how this country learns. As I say, it’s sad. It’s also a case where if you have economic collapse and suffering, that’s where the local churches come in.

These people who think they’re “Lone Ranger Christians” just attending church by the Internet and not part of a functional local church are going to be up a creek without a paddle. The local church for 2,000 years has been through one disaster after another. I always go back to this. Rome fell, but the church survived. There have been a lot of Romes that have fallen, but the church continues to survive.

It’s amazing that even in the Middle East today the church is surviving and expanding. Do you realize that the country that has the fastest conversion from Islam to Christianity is Iran? Now Iran is a dictatorship. I know what’s going on because an ex-Muslim is an elder in our congregation and he’s teaching the Framework to an ex-Muslim Iranian church in Washington, D.C. so I regularly get feedback on what’s going on.

These people in Washington, D.C. are leading their families to Christ over the telephone. It’s going on because they’re hungry. They’re tired of the legalism. They’re tired of stuff that doesn’t work. The Iranian economy is in a mess. They’ve spent all this money on their navy and their missiles. They’ve got about 35% unemployment. People aren’t happy with that.

They’re not impressed because they have missiles. They’d be better impressed if they had jobs. So that’s what is going on. When you have Iranian families having to sell their daughters to Dubai and other whore houses to keep money flowing in the family, you’ve got a problem. These people don’t like to do that but that’s how bad it is in Sunni Iran [should have said Shia Iran].

The Christians are very strong in Iran. They’re not vocal. They’re quiet Christians because they know what’s going to happen. If you remember two years ago there were a lot of riots in the streets in Iran, protesting certain policies. We can’t say this but some of the people in the streets were Christians.

The idea of liberty and that there was something wrong with the mullahs was spreading. We’re not saying that Christians are going to revolt and cause changes, but they cause resistance, quiet resistance.

I think you’re going to see that in the United States as we impose restriction after restriction on schools. You’re going to see this, I think. Take for example a school district with 4,000 or 5,000 students. What would happen if 200 families in their district took their kids out and started homeschooling them?

Every kid that leaves the school system drains the school system of $12,000 a year. You can talk economics all you want to, but money speaks. When the school authorities see the population going down, their budget is going down.

That’s why the teachers unions are always against charter schools and home schooling. It’s not because of education, but they want to keep their jobs. They’re going to lose their jobs if the schools lose their budgets.

There are mechanisms that can work in these kinds of situations. The sad thing is that in cases of bad neighborhoods where the parents are so frustrated that their kids have to go to low-quality schools, we have the present administration making it harder and harder to have charter schools.

In Washington, D.C. when we had the head of the school system there, a South Korean and she was a disciplinarian. She wanted quality education in those schools. She couldn’t get it because bureaucracy impeded her so she made some rules where they could allow charter schools which were set up.

The parents in those communities said, “That’s great. I’ll send my kids to the charter school.” When the kids started going to the charter school, what happened to the population in the public school system? Bingo, it went down. What did that cause? Budget problems.

Then what happened? The Federal Department of Education which is over the District of Columbia decided to pull the rug out from all the charter schools. The parents see this. Increasing numbers of Americans are seeing stupid people in charge, making stupid decision after stupid decision.

That’s a growing thing here. When Franklin Graham went to Hartford and other state capitals, if you go to those meetings, you see 8,000 to 10,000 people there. That’s interesting because for every person who goes to those things, there are probably 100 to 200 more people who just couldn’t make it.

What’s so encouraging about this is that most of those people are believers. They’re there, frankly because they believe in the gospel and Franklin Graham’s ministry. And yet, when you have those kinds of crowds consistently in state capitol after state capitol, that tells you something.

There’s tension in our society as John Stonestreet said recently when he was reading the diatribe that was made by Dr. Boucher who said “you evangelicals better get it straight on same sex marriage and homosexuality because we’re going to crush you and there’s no middle ground.”

Stonestreet said, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to continue to function as the body of Christ and we’re going to ignore you.” He was talking in context of Louisiana and the flooding that’s happened there.

He said, “Who’s taking care of the people in Louisiana? Is it the atheists? Do you see any big group of atheists going down to help the people of Louisiana?” No, there’s one big Baptist Church there whose buildings are being offered as a shelter and the Christians are coming in.

By the way, the Red Cross doesn’t have enough people so every time there’s a disaster, the Red Cross has a contract with the Southern Baptist Convention, Christians, to be the relief workers. That was a new one to me. I didn’t know that. It’s interesting. The Red Cross is now saying to a cop who was trying to bring a Bible into one of the refugee centers, “You can’t pray here. Get the Bible out.” Red Cross officials evidently don’t know what the Cross is about. But that’s irrelevant.

Like Stonestreet said, “You won’t find the atheists and the critics down there slogging their way through the mud to help people. You’ll find believers doing that.” And that’s what we’re going to continue to do and we’re going to trust the Lord with that. I can’t give you specific advice on how to handle that situation, but we can trust the Lord to work in there.

If we go through hard times, we go through hard times. I was telling the people at lunch the other day that if you remember in Kentucky that courageous lady [Kim Davis], a Christian, who refused to sign wedding applications. She was a county clerk and she refused to do it and so we had some left-wing governor put her in jail.

It’s interesting that the judge that put her in jail got one of the nastiest notes from the head of a homosexual community in California. Now this is interesting. It’s very insightful. The guy in California recognized that there would be a problem. He said, “Judge, you stepped in it because what you did now is you created a martyr and that’s the last thing we need.”

Listen, think about what he said. If people have to go to jail for their faith, that creates martyrs and that creates negative publicity they cannot afford. That galvanizes people and they don’t want to do that. The letter is proof of that. “Whatever you do, don’t make martyrs.”

All right, there have been martyrs down through church history. What’s worse? Going to jail for a few years or going to hell for eternity? Let’s talk about what the issue is here. There’s strength in convictions and the government can go through all kinds of processes.

There are a lot of Christians in government. When I was in government for twenty-five years, there were a lot of Christians in government who were frustrated. I have a son who is working in the office of the Secretary of Defense. He’s frustrated.

There is resistance. There are ways you have in government of dragging your feet so if the politicians put through a regulation we can fix it so that regulation doesn’t become effective for years. We can create excuses like we don’t have the money to do this or we can’t do that.

There are ways of jamming a regulation, and there are ways of learning about a regulation and turning it around and using it back against the people who are causing the problem. It requires ingenuity.

I used to say you can’t make a regulation that if I am creative enough and I study that regulation, I can come back and wrap you up in it. There are just ways of evasion that we can do.

Here’s another question. “What approach to the presentation of the gospel message is most appropriate in a pagan post-modern culture?”

I would offer the advice of the Geisler book, Conversational Evangelism. You have four or five different approaches and you have to be flexible. You don’t know in our culture if a guy who says he’s a Christian really is a Christian.

First of all, you have to figure out if they’re really Christians. Do they really believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life and have that eternal sense of security? Sometimes a person will come to you and say they’re an atheist. You just have to talk to them enough to find out they may be agnostics and they don’t know the difference. That’s why that book is so important. I recommend as an answer to that question, Conversational Evangelism by the Geislers.

Here’s another question. “Any suggestions for apologetics like the Lisle books? Could you further explain the post-modern mindset in regard to their characteristic of social group alone?” That slide that I showed on this. The idea apparently and I’m not an expert on post-modernism. I just kind of observe it. They believe in community. That’s one of their buzz words. In one sense they’re right that community affects how you believe.

A local church is a community. They’re right in recognizing the role of community but what they mean by community is that the language, the ideas that are transmitted in this community somehow evolve and none of them may be true but the group just talking back and forth just creates this momentum.

The problem is whether the momentum is true. You could say that in 1933–34 the Germans voted Hitler into office. They had a community. The question was whether it was a legitimate community, whether it was an ethical community.

That’s the dilemma. Post-modernists do not have a grasp of truth. They do not believe that you really have transcendent truth, that Nuremburg thing I showed. It’s just their opinion.

“What is the greatest weakness in the post-modern mindset?” Precisely that. They try to create identity without truth. It’s creating all kinds of psychological problems like I showed you in the University of Massachusetts up here. These students are trying to create their own identity when God didn’t intend us to do that.

Our hearts, our strength isn’t sufficient to do that. That’s why they go to a group. The group gives them identity. An insight on that one is the book by Rosario Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. Dr. Butterfield was a leading advocate of gay rights at Syracuse University. I quoted her book and her second book in this series.

Rosario Butterfield goes on to describe in her case how the lesbian community thinks and how they live. It’s a great exposition by someone who lived in that community. I refer you to her. She’s a very clear writer, has a PhD and is a literature professor. She’s now a pastor’s wife.

If you look on YouTube, you may catch her at certain places where she interacts. She’s very quick-witted. To give you an idea of how quick-witted she is, she and her husband can’t have children for some reason so they adopt children. They made it a practice in their home of adopting bi-racial children.

One day she was sitting in the backseat of her car with a little black child she had adopted and they were outside some country church in Virginia. This white man comes out and he’s looking the car and he sees her in the backseat with her black child in her lap. He says, “Well, it must be chic to adopt black children.” She looks up and without breaking a breath says, “Are you a Christian?” He says, “Yeah.” She says, “Is it chic of God to adopt you?” That shows you how quick she can be on the trigger.

I encourage you to get Rosario Butterfield and her book is The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.

Another question: “What are the ramifications on society when they believe that man is perfectible?”

Horace Mann is the guy who did that. If you believe that man is perfectible, then government gets involved in doing the perfecting. The interesting thing is that people who believe in perfectibility of people won’t let people perfect themselves. It’s remarkable.

The belief that human life is perfectible is usually on the part of elites that feel they are called, have some sort of divine call, to be the ones that perfect humanity. It tends to lead to tyranny.

In education that leads to the idea that the state knows more than the parents and that it is going to create a perfect society. I think most people realize it’s not working too well. That’s the danger, though. Usually it manifests itself politically in the educational system.

Question: “Recognizing the risks of exposing our children to secular education, how do we, as Christians, weigh those risks against the opportunity to be lights in the world at school and later in the community and professions requiring advanced education?”

That’s a good question. The question of whether to send your kids to secular education in K–12 is a personal question. You could have Christian teachers there. The problem is that no matter what you do in sending them, even if there are Christian teachers, those Christian teachers themselves are constrained by the policy of the school.

You’re still not really getting the education that we as Christians should get. The way you can fight this, if you have to, is to make sure you have times to sit down with your children and talk through these issues.

The problem we find now is that it used to be that families had supper together so that was a time during the day when you could interact with your children. You could ask, “How was your day?” Now everyone is running to soccer practice at six and you have basketball at seven so sports have taken away the family supper.

We have a problem now. When do you get time with your children to just talk heart-to-heart to know where they’re at? Families are so busy, running here, running there, doing this, doing that, that we don’t have that time. I keep going back to the fact that you should ask yourself how Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador and father of John Kennedy, got his three sons into politics.

It wasn’t that Joe Kennedy pushed them into politics. It wasn’t just because he was wealthy. These boys sat at a supper table with their dad week after week after week. Old man Kennedy insisted at least two or three times a week that each one of those boys read the front page of the paper and the lead story. They talked about it as they ate supper. So naturally, they all three got into politics.

It wasn’t because he shoved them in there. It was just because their dad modeled what a citizen does. They had the money so they could afford to go into politics.

The point I’m saying is, you need to look at the family structure. We keep going back to the family structure. If that family structure isn’t there, school isn’t going to solve the problem. If you ask any public school teacher who struggles in the classroom, day after day, week after week, with kids who come out of homes that are dysfunctional. There’s no way dysfunctional families are going to overcome this problem.

As Christians, as we can get our families functioning, we can have time with the kids that is just parent-child time. There’s no substitute for that. Only a dad or a mom who is driving the car with the kids in the back seat and all of a sudden, maybe on the way to the grocery store, and there’s a teaching moment.

The kid comes out with this question, a profound question, on the way to Walmart. Well what do we do? That’s great. The teacher in the classroom wasn’t exposed at that moment that kid had that question. It’s still a job for parents.

I still say that if you are trying to send your kids to a secular school you need to go get some textbooks, even if you have to go talk to someone that home schools and get some of those textbooks they have. Try working with your child through those textbooks.

I have some mothers who have been after me for five or six years to come up with a manual using the Framework. They don’t want something that duplicates homeschooling. They just want something like this that ties the pieces together.

That’s why I’m trying to reduce my speaking engagements so I can rewrite the notes on the Framework. Until I write the notes the gals that are trying to put this together don’t have something to use.

Their argument is that we have got to anticipate that the government is going to come after homeschoolers. Hillary Clinton has openly said that we have to change the naïve religious beliefs of this nation if we are to progress. She recognizes very clearly who the resisters are. It’s you and me and she wants it changed. Homeschooling is one engine that is creating the problem from their viewpoint.

We need resources to do this. Thankfully, there are quite a few good resources out there. I will say, however, that it’s mostly reformed authors that are doing the work. They are the ones producing the work. I don’t know what’s wrong with the dispensational people that we are not producing good quality stuff.

There are some exceptions. I would, if I were you, go to a home-school family that knows what they’re doing and at least borrow, or buy, some of those materials. It’s not going to be easy.

Another question and I think this will be one of the last; “Can you touch on the terrorism that is going on in the world today?”

The terrorism is not new. If you go back in history Thomas Jefferson had the same problem. Our ships were being intercepted in the straits of Gibraltar by pirates. They were Muslims and were enslaving our crews. They were arresting them and putting them into prison. Now that was happening in 1780 and 1790 so this is not new, new stuff.

The Muslims had been there since AD 600. Who invaded Europe? They talk about the Crusades, the white people in Europe. How did the Crusades get started? Because the Muslims had already invaded Europe. This has been going on for centuries.

It is not new. Tragically we have leadership who does not recognize that and can’t even name it. Right? The problem is the terrorists want a millennium. They want their kingdom to come. The problem is they’re imposing law, Sharia law, thinking that somehow Sharia law is going to compel and bring into existence this kingdom.

It’s not going to happen. God’s law couldn’t bring in the kingdom. If God’s law couldn’t bring in the kingdom, their laws can’t either. They may create a caliphate. The Sunni branch of Islam has always wanted to produce a caliphate.

The significant thing today is that Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, wants to bring in a caliphate. You saw the military try to have a coup because most of them have been trained by our military. They don’t want this. The military in Turkey have always been the ones who want a secular Turkey. They do not want a caliphate.

Turkey had a caliphate. It’s called the Ottoman Empire. It was destroyed in World War I. When we destroyed that caliphate that opened up the Middle East. That’s why the Middle East is in a mess, because diplomats sat out with a map and drew lines on the map, “This is Iran. This is Iraq. This is Syria.” The lines don’t fit the tribes.

That’s why you have Kurds who have no home in Iran, no home in Turkey, no home in Iraq. What do the Kurds do? The Kurds were never given a home place. Why? Because the lines on the map left them high and dry. In fact, instability is now propagated.

Terrorism is going to go on. The only way it’s going to be defeated is to have ideological conflict. I think that one reason God has allowed this Muslim terrorism in our day is to discipline Western apostate civilization.

Think back to the three sons of Noah. What does it say Japheth has to do? He has to dwell in the tents of who? Shem. So Western civilization was grounded in revelation out of Shem in the Bible, the Old Testament.

It’s almost as if God is saying, “You didn’t listen to My revelation. You turned your back on Me. So now I’m going to give you a little lesson. I’m going to take some revelation and I’m going to shove it right in your face.” That’s what Islam is doing in Europe.

Europeans are so blah. They have these thousands and thousands of immigrants now. Our neighbor married a German girl. You ask her, “What’s it like in Germany?”

She answers, “Well, after the Muslims raped 1,200 girls at the New Year’s parties now there’s this resistance in Germany to the immigrants.” The problem is that part of the resistance to immigration in Germany are the neo-Nazis. So now we’re rising up in the Nazi-fashion since World War II, swastikas and all, to attack the immigrants.

You can see how this is all leading to a big mess. You can imagine the Western press with neo-Nazism in Germany, so they’re going to take the side of the immigrants. The neo-Nazis say, “We’re armed and we’ll take care of the problem.”

Now you’ll start seeing violence in Europe. We’re so stupid we’re letting these people into the country. We have no way of vetting them or whatever. That’s terrorism and I don’t think there is any answer except we have to live out our lives as though we believe God’s Word and we let the chips fall.

Keep in mind that during the twentieth century there have been isolated Christians here and there, moms and dads who inculcated biblical truths in their children.

Let me give you some examples. Dr. Ice gave these examples recently at our church. When it came to Israel and the land back in World War I and the land wasn’t Israel, the question was after World War I, what do we do with the Jews? What do we do with Palestine?

There was a dispensationalist, a Plymouth Brethren man named Lord Balfour. Those of you who have studied history probably know about the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration happened in the British government because one Christian man had such influence on the government he said, “We have to create a home for the Jews.” That was the Balfour Declaration.

Unfortunately it was only a declaration. It was not law. After World War I the British government changed and then you had chaos about what area of the Middle East is Jewish territory.

In 1920, you have the San Remo treaty and that was a treaty signed by not us, but by England, Japan, France, and Italy. Now that treaty, not a resolution, gives the Jews political control all through the West Bank, everything west of the Jordan River was to be controlled politically by the Jews.

Everyone ignores the treaty. We have secretaries of state who would say, “Have you read the treaty? That’s what the treaty says.” But it was totally ignored.

What happened then in history is that in 1948 comes the day that Israel says, “We are announcing our nationhood.” At that moment in time we, America, was the first entity to recognize Israel.

Do you know why? Because Harry Truman (people called him a cussing Baptist) was president. My wife is just finishing McCullough’s book on Harry Truman. As a young boy he was trained in the Bible. He had conservative, evangelical parents who taught him the faith in the Word of God. He was told in 1948, “Don’t get involved in the Middle East. Let the Jews suffer. Let’s not get involved with that.”

The entire State Department pleaded with Harry Truman not to recognize Israel. At that moment, because of his childhood training, not because of the State Department, not because he had a PhD, but because the Word of God that his father and mother planted in him came rising up in his soul and he said, “No, we are going to have a home for the Jews.”

We recognized within an hour Israel. Once the United States recognized Israel, the other nations joined in. That was because our leadership, just as in the British government had one Christian man, Lord Balfour, we had a president who in his childhood learned to respect Israel. In that moment of decision, it was his childhood training that rose to the surface.

Take another instance, 1973. The Yom Kippur War. 1967, the Six Day War, was a pre-emptive strike. The Israelis knew that the Arabs were going to strike them. So they chose, because they had limited real estate to fall back on, they struck first. That was a pre-emptive strike.

Israel got criticized, “Blah. Blah. They started the war.” So in 1973 the Arabs decided to try it again. The president or prime minister at the time was a former teacher from the Minneapolis school system, Golda Meir. She was an immigrant. She came from our country to Israel and she rose up through the political system to become Prime Minister.

Golda Meir said, “What do I do? If we strike again, the first strike, the world is against us, so I can’t do that. We’re going to have to absorb the first hit.” They almost lost the country. At that moment, who was president? Richard Nixon. He grew up in a Quaker home. In that Quaker home he learned about Israel.

At that moment in 1973 Henry Kissinger was telling Nixon, “Let the Jews bleed awhile.”

Richard Nixon said, “No, I will not let the Jews bleed awhile. We’re going to come to their defense.” He stripped out our whole air force in Europe to provide parts for their air force, which was decimated in the early hours of that conflict.

What Dr. Ice is pointing to is that at critical moments in time there’s a Christian leader who quietly has risen to the top and at that critical hour he’s there or she’s there to make the decision.

That’s why I’m urging you to look at the value, here at North Stonington Bible Church, of all these young people, all these babies. I keep telling you the story of how Hillary grew up in a conservative Methodist home and what turned her to left-wing was a Methodist youth pastor.

That man changed her thinking. He told her what to major in and hooked her up with Saul Alinsky, of all people, while she was in college and stayed with her during the years. Now I ask you a question. Do you suppose that Methodist youth pastor thought when he looked at that 16 or 17 year old girl that she could someday run for president?

Probably not. But you see every one of you young people here don’t know, if the Lord doesn’t return, what that baby in the crib could be doing forty years down the road.

You have no idea how God can use his life, but you have the opportunity to influence his thinking. You have an opportunity to bring those young people to Jesus Christ. Think back to the stories I told you. Harry Truman, at one point in time, at a crucial point in the actual decision-making process, reverted back to what his mom and his dad taught him. See how powerful it can be.

Think of a gal by the name of Esther. Esther saved the Jews in Iran, Persia. You know, Esther didn’t just think of that when the crisis came. Esther was the young woman who had been trained over years and years of walking with the Lord. When the crisis hit, she was ready. Her strength didn’t come because she took a drink or something five minutes before the disaster. She was there in “a time such as this” because she had been in the Word of God over and over and over.

Think of Mary, after the angel comes and tells her, a young girl, that she’s going to be pregnant by God. Talk about social pressure on a gal. How about that one? Then she comes out in Luke 2 with this enormous praising of the Lord, the so-called Magnificat of Mary. I don’t know how old Mary was when that happened. Maybe a 16- or 17-year-old young girl. Whatever it was, she was ready.

Read Luke 2 and ask yourself, “How did a 16-year-old girl know all that theology?” It must have been her dad and her mom who taught her that.

Again, the message is that you have to be ready when the crisis hits. Some of us will never have opportunities, but you can’t tell when you personally or your child will have an opportunity to influence our nation because of the position you or they are in.

It may be only to influence a company, a company’s policies, or a school district. That’s why you are investing in this country every time you yourself are in the Word of God and every time you help a young person with their faith.

A couple of other questions and then we’ll just have open questions here. One question is “These things we pray for will not automatically be given unless we practically pray for them. Like James says, ‘You have not because you ask not.’ ”

Another one here is “Prophets are no longer in existence in the Church Age.” As we have the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, I would say when God completed the Canon, why do we need other prophets? We have enough problems understanding what the Lord has given us. I don’t need more of the Word of God. I’ve got enough problems with the Word of God as it is.

Okay, are there any other questions? We have about ten minutes or so. (Indistinct question about the Big Bang.)

The Big Bang, I would say has always been controversial. We may or may not realize it, but there are twenty-nine other cosmologies out there besides the Big Bang. There was an entire website by physicists who doubted the Big Bang. They wrote many letters asking why they were holding to the Big Bang because there are so many internal conflicts with it.

A great discussion of the Big Bang and why it has weaknesses is John Hartnett’s book, Starlight, Time, and the New Physics. There’s an excellent discussion about this. This gives you an idea and he writes clearly. I’m not a cosmologist, but he writes clearly enough so I can understand his reasoning. I would recommend this book.

An earlier book was Humphreys’ Starlight and Time.

Anyone else? Yes. The question is I mentioned the book when we were talking about Noah and his three sons and I was showing you the DNA plots. The recent research in DNA shows us how to take different people groups and track back the DNA to three nodes and that has to be the maternal side. It tracks back to three women. The obvious answer is that must be the wives of Ham, Shem, and Japheth because all the boys would have the genes of their dad.

The different genes came in through the three women that the boys married. The author is Arthur Custance. There are notes on the Internet in crude form. I was on overtime work in the Army at the time and I was just putting the notes in. They’re not edited at all. It’s what I have to start working on.

Now the question is: “I mentioned something about changing anatomically after the Fall. What I was trying to show you was that when the Fall occurred, there were wide-ranging consequences. You had a zoological change. The serpent was changed. We don’t know how many other animals were changed. At least one was, the serpent was changed.

We have the botanical change in the plants. Thorns and thistles suddenly come up. That’s new. Then I said anatomically because I was talking about both Eve and Adam. Eve was said to have pain in her childbirth so obviously something happened in the female body at the point of the Fall. Same thing with Adam. Whether it’s partly the stress of working the ground, he was told “In sweat you will work”. Work is difficult. Whether that’s an anatomical thing or not you could debate, but the point is there were effects that were visible as a result of the Fall. It wasn’t just a little Bible story for first graders.

Any other questions? Yes sir. This question involves the missionary Satellite 7 where the gospel is being beamed down to earth from satellite. Apparently it’s effective, but we don’t have total information. It’s one of the ways we’re reaching these closed societies, through cable, through satellite, and also through the Internet.

These countries resist the Internet. China can censor their Internet but they can’t censor downlink cable stuff as long as you have the antenna. Christians have been doing this before satellites. Remember HCJB and the Transworld radio? They were beaming radio into China and Russia all during the Cold War.

Christians have been very concerned about doing that, about reaching these unreachable people. Yeah, I would say it sounds like a good ministry.

Question: The question here is about the two kingdoms. The issue here is that Satan wants to be like God but in one sense so do people in that we want to be self-sufficient. It’s a striking passage that you mentioned in the Gospel of John.

The Gospel of John is written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ. It’s one of the clearest Gospels on the gospel. Belief in Christ is always the point of the Apostle John in that Gospel. It’s interesting that he cites this troubling statement that Jesus made when he looks out at the unbeliever and says, “How can you believe, you who receive honor from one another, how can you believe?”

It’s a challenge to the fact that unbelief assumes or tries to create sort of a self-propelled arrogance, saying “I will approve whom I receive approval from.” See, it gets back to that same “I will” in Genesis 11.

“I am the one. I will decide.”

We’re at the end of our time. One more question. “What is the latest position in evolution?”

The problem is for those who have watched and report on evolution, the house is in discord. There are three different ideas being batted around. One is the old Neo-Darwinism of random changes and mutations with natural selection working overtime. That’s one. It was 1930.

Then we have Dr. Gould at Harvard who is now dead who said that because he couldn’t find transitional fossils in the fossil record, evolution must have been zero until it suddenly speeded up and we have punctuated evolution where it speeded up so fast no records were left.

This is useful for us because he admits they can’t find transitional fossils. Gould’s argument counter to that was that it must have happened so fast nothing is recorded in the fossil record. That’s the second belief.

The third one is they have a group of dissenting biologists who want to look at the whole thing but they haven’t come up with anything yet. That tells you they have some problems with that.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this time together. We thank You for wonderful people who are here at North Stonington. We thank You for their attention. We thank You for their seriousness in looking at Your Word and orienting their lives to it.

We ask for growth on their part and for encouragement as they come to these great truths. We ask it in our Savior’s name. Amen.”